Meme Huffer

The (accidental) birth of "Just Do It."

I've spent the past few weeks working on a rather large regional pitch (which included a "planning tribe" of 15 planners from around the network -but thats a whole other story), and have consequently spent a great deal of time crafting new brand positionings, organising ideas, proposition statements and endlines.

Always interesting, that process of trying to distil down all of your thinking into one thought, or even one word. For some, this is the Holy Grail of what we do, whether it is a planner's strategically complete yet creatively fertile proposition or the creative's perfectly apposite endline.The 'gold standards' are always discussed, from BMW's "The Ultimate Driving Machine" to Apple's "Think Different".

But the one that everyone seems to lionise is Nike with "Just Do It". Now, there is a certainly a clear insight and a leap of strategic brilliance to "If you have a body, you're an athlete". But have a look at Dan Wieden telling a story about the birth of what is probably the most famous tagline of all time:

Keeping it real

As a Kiwi, I find it bloody hard to lavish praise upon anything that comes from 'The West Island', but this VB spot from Droga5 is a cracker.

The endline is just on the right side of the "fine line between clever and stupid" (D. St. Hubbins). It fulfills the dictum that 'great ads transcend target markets'. It doesn't hold with all that beautiful-cold-frosted-glass hero shot nonsense. And it feels like the start of something much bigger (go take a look at the website).

But what really does it for me is the lack of artifice and bullshit advertising pretence. It feels real, authentic and inclusive, and, to this planner at least, this has never been more important. Not just "perceived authenticity" (ie well-acted spots with a patina of realness to them) but real, genuine authenticity. Real insights into real people delivered with real (non-addy) humour.

From my own experience, we have seen the benefits that "Dance" and "Singalong" have had on the T-Mobile brand, transforming it from a.n.other purveyor of vibrating air into a brand which consumers have a genuine affinity for, a brand that doesn't just advertise its brand promise ('Life's for sharing') but which actually lives and breathes it by bringing it to life for people in the real world.

We need to be in the business of forming relationships between brands and consumers. And how much easier is to form a relationship with a brand that across as human and real and honest and understanding? While many brand owners still believe that "their" brand belongs to be up on a pedestal, their more successful colleagues have figured out that a) it isn't "their" brand at all, and b) it is far, far better to be down rubbing shoulders with your customers.

Great Quotes for Planners #65 -McLuhan on research

 

"Trying to predict the future based on research is like trying to drive a car by looking in the rear-view mirror."

                                            -Marshall McLuhan

Meme Huffer would like to thank Dave Trott for unearthing this (and many more) in last week's Campaign Private View (oddly, not online). I've been shamelessly stealing that McLuhan line for years, but had forgotten the source.

Photo courtesy: Sr. Arrastrao

Great Quote for Planners #63 - Beyond the quant

"If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability."

-Vannevar Bush

Or, to put it another way, you need to think beyond the numbers, beyond the measurable and predictable.
Look at irrational as well as rational behaviours.

And don't forget to pay to attention to the lies while you're looking for the truth.

photo credit: Ashley Bingham

Great Quotes for Planners #62 - Read around

"I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way."
- Franklin Pierce Adams

I was having a great chat with a colleague this morning (hi Jane!) about how one finds interesting things -y'know, the little factoids and opinion pieces that may lead to insights one day. Then I serendipitously stumpled upon this quote, which kinda sums up the point I was making about the importance of reading actual newspapers and magazines rather than just skimming the headlines of RSS feeds.

Don't get me wrong -searching for stuff online is great, but it makes it harder to learn about the things that you don't know that you don't know...

Photo: Cameron MacMaster @ flickr

Great Quotes for Planners #61 -Avoiding the well-known

If you want to avoid being involved in yet another beer (or cider) in which three guys walk into a bar with ensuing hilarity (note that it's always three -one would be a lonely alcoholic loser and two could be gay... and its best of one could be black, while you're at it please), then please heed Mencken's advice:

"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem
-neat, plausible, and wrong."  -H.L. Mencken

Dig deeper. Question the obvious. And, please, avoid "conventional wisdom" like the plague.

Great Quotes for Planners #60 -keep your eyes open

"You can observe a lot just by watching" -Yogi Berra

For me, this quote nails one of the joys of planning -figuring out what people really think, need and want.

All too often, the lens of the focus group will distort the subject of your enquiry and the statistics can obscure rather than reveal the truth (it is true that the average person has one breast and one testicle, but that doesn't help us much).

So get out there in the real world. Don't just sit behind glass. Talk to people about what makes them tick. Be curious. Notice stuff.

Sometimes you just don't need a clever strategy

I'm happy to be proven wrong, but I'm pretty sure that this rather genius new Durex spot was born without any plannerly midwifery:

It's pretty simple -animal balloons are funny. Animals having sex are funny. And animals enjoying spitroasting and threesomes are particularly funny.

A colleague and I were discussing this ad (having spotted it here) and were trying to figure out how a planner could have helped, or what the proposition might have been:

"Durex -good for kinky animal sex"? -nah, that would go somewhere else entirely.

It is a simple, engaging and product-centric creative idea, and perhaps the best thing a planner did was to avoid the temptation to over-intellectualise.

Agency: Fitzgerald + Co
Animation Studio: Superfad

PS Given that its all CGI, they get extra Huffer points for posting the bloopers onto YouTube. Nice.

GQFP #53 - Marx on risk (Groucho, that is, not Karl)

 

Wise words from one of my favourite funnymen: -in planning as in life, you need to get beyond the norms if you want to achieve anything meaningful.

from Graphic Exchange via ffffound

"We kill bad ideas with new business models"

 

This morning I wandered across this gem from Matt Mason (author of 'The Pirate's Dilemma') via the a rather genius Penguin We Tell Stories digital writing project. Well worth a read, & you can even download the pdf here.

Sounds like Nokia and Sony Ericsson have been paying attention.